"Technical Report: Impact of Connection Splitting on TCP Performance," Arpith Chacko Jacob, Rahul Pratap Maddimsetty 2005.

http://www.arpith.com/media/papers/tcpcc.pdf

Abstract: In this project, we investigate the effect of splitting a single TCP connection into several shorter connections taking the same route. The main motivation for these experiments is to study the inherent tendency of TCP to favour (i.e. facilitate achievement of higher throughput on) connections with lower RTT. We observe that TCP indeed performs significantly better on connections with low RTT, and hence are able to speedup a file transfer between two nodes by adding one or more intermediate nodes.
The performance metrics used to compare the TCP performance of the direct connection to that of the the split connections are the Total Transfer time, Average RTT and Throughput. We study this effect for various file sizes, link qualities and number of intermediate nodes. Planet-Lab was used to run a large number of experiments for this analysis.

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